DIY: Most Common Word

Solve the interview question "Most Common Word" yourself in this lesson.

We'll cover the following

Problem statement

In this challenge, you are given a paragraph and a array of banned words. Your task is to find the most frequent word in the paragraph that is not in the array of banned words. While searching for the most common word, ignore the case and punctuation in the paragraph.

Note: It is guaranteed that the answer is unique, and there is at least one word that isn’t banned.

Input

The inputs are a string named paragraph and an array of strings named banned. The words in banned are in lowercase, and the paragraph string is not case sensitive. The following is an example of the inputs:

paragraph = "Do not enter the forest. THE forest is haunted. The kids play in the FOREST and get haunted by witches."
banned = ["the", "do", "not", "in", "is"]

Output

The output will be the string that is most common in the paragraph and does not belong in banned words. The output string should be in the lowercase.

"forest"

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